SANDRA Memory Bandwidth
As you can see, the Clarkdale doesn’t offer as much Memory Bandwidth as the Core i5 750, but it does double that of the E8400. That’s because the integrated memory controller on the 750 is stronger, but weaker on the E8400 which relies on an external chipset memory controller. Memory bandwidth is very important to the CPU’s Hyper-Threads especially when encoding which you’ll see next.
HandBrake
Again, while the i5 661 doesn’t match the i5 750, it does leave the E8400 well in the dust. If the i5 661’s integrated memory controller were better, it would probably come very close to matching the i5 750. However, that would probably create a bit of a pricing paradox, making it harder to choose between the two parts.
Cinebench Rendering
Equally CPU intensive is Cinebench. You can see it highly favors Multi-Core and Hyper-Threaded performance. But, Single Core rendering favors the 661 overall and essentially leaves the Turbo-less i5 750 and E8400 in the dust. Intel Turbo Boost dynamically overclocked the i5 661 to 3.6GHz which you can’t get from the other two processors.
Best yet, it does this all by itself so if you lack the ninja skillz of overclocking, it does it for you.
Crysis
At 3.3GHz, the Core i5 661 offers far more than enough frequency and bandwidth to produce extremely playable frame rates using our chosen GPU, the GTX 295. Since the game is single threaded utilizing only one CPU, Core 0 got a small frame rate boost with Turbo enabled on the 661, while the other cores don’t have that capability. Any questions?
H.264 Video and Audio Playback
This is one area I can’t stress enough. The video experience on the Clarkdale DH55TC platform is really great. Compared to previous generation chipsets and integrated video experiences, the platform was down right “sweet”. CPU resources were as little as 2% during some tests and never went above 27% when queuing up massive movies.
The majority of the time, resources were limited to less than 10% producing a very viewable frame rate average on the DH55TC motherboard. As you know, sticking and stuttering during a movie is something that totally ruins the home theatre experience and this platform combo does not do that to you.
A few features like 1.3 HDMI spec, Dolby True HD, and Dolby DTS-HD make this all possible especially in terms of audio performance. Plus, the folks at Intel were happy to point a very obvious feature over looked by many. The integrated PCIE GPU is “on chip” and not “on die” meaning its built into the core rather than next to it. Latencies are about as non-existent as can be expected.